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30 - The sixties: realism and experiment

from PART FOUR - POST-WAR CULTURES, 1945–1970

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
John Lucas
Edited by
Laura Marcus  and
Peter Nicholls
Laura Marcus
Affiliation:
University of Sussex
Peter Nicholls
Affiliation:
University of Sussex
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Summary

We have grown used to a way of telling the history. The 1950s, that decade of rationing, austerity, of dank deference and drab conformity, was replaced by the explosive energies of the 1960s, exuberant, experimental, enterprising. But this is History as Headlines: alliterative and casually associative. These or similar headlines can be glimpsed hovering over the cut-and-paste methods adopted by Martin Harrison, the curator of an exhibition mounted at the Barbican in 2002, TRANSITION: The London Art Scene in the Fifties. In the introductory essay to his splendid catalogue, Harrison reports the artist Richard Smith’s feeling that living and working through the fifties was analogous to a journey from darkness to light. Harrison’s exhibition becomes a step-by-step retracing of this journey. The first important painting is by David Bomberg, ‘Evening in the City of London’, painted in 1944, its slabs of red and umber, with the black of St Paul’s brooding in the background, eloquent of a city broken and burnt by Nazi incendiary bombs. The last painting is by David Hockney. ‘I’m in the Mood for Love’, executed in 1961, wittily plays with the image of a wolf on the prowl against a phantasmagoric New York skyline. Sexual intercourse is not far off. Moreover, Hockney’s work, while it undoubtedly owes something to Francis Bacon’s ways of slathering paint on canvas, points in a quite different direction. Hockney is making clear that his paintings are not, in Harrison’s words, ‘literal representation of fact’. Now meaning is to be found in the marks made on canvas.

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The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature , pp. 545 - 562
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2005

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